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April 5, 2016

All the stars aligned over the last week and I ended up having mad whisky-fulled chats about the music industry with a bunch of former Shock Records peeps, a British A&R guy and an American tour manager about the general shape of the music industry. Interestingly the Brit and the Yank both mentioned how supportive and healthy the music industry is down under, particularly the wealth of grants and scholarships on offer in this fine country. They both also mentioned how talented our bands are because OF COURSE THEY ARE (the name Kevin Parker always gets said).

It’s perfect timing then for Music Australia’s new stats around the music industry in Aus and its positive impact on the nation’s economy (gotta love them numbers). More importantly, Music Australia also had a look at the potential of our local music sector and what it could achieve with a bit more government support.

Things that stuck out to me:

36 of the top 100 ARIA albums of 2014 were by Australian acts. Would be interesting to see similar stats for other countries and see how other nations compare (apart from the UK and the US where locals probably dominate sales).

Every gold coin put into the local music business circulates $3 back into the Aussie economy. (I don’t know how that sorcery works but fucking sounds good.)

Also the results show that I am one of 37, 652 full-timers in Australia’s music sector. Pretty neat, huh? For some reason I thought there only about 10K of us.

Full report here and Music Australia’s blog post breakdown about what this all means here (including why we need to protect our fantastic live music scene since incomes are heavily skewed towards live vs. recorded music).